The Cathartic Finale of “Big Little Lies”

The finale of “Big Little Lies” was queasy, gorgeous, and smart, like the rest of the show.

PHOTOGRAPH BY HILARY BRONWYN GAYLE / HBO

In the first few minutes of the first episode of HBO’s “Big Little Lies,” the limited series that wrapped up on Sunday night, we are presented with the show’s central mystery: a brutal murder at a glitzy fund-raiser at the Otter Bay Elementary School, in Monterey, California. Quick cuts from police interviews—idle, bitchy speculation tendered by well-off parents—provide the show’s Greek chorus, breaking up the voluptuous, extended flashbacks that lead the viewer back to the night of the crime.

“Big Little Lies” was adapted by David E. Kelley from a Liane Moriarty novel of the same name. It’s about three mothers: Madeline (Reese Witherspoon, high-strung and glorious); Celeste (Nicole Kidman, bewitching and bruised); and Jane (Shailene Woodley as an outsider, too young and too poor). Their stories move quickly: careful charades and impulsive acts tumble headlong, punctuated by transition shots of pale surf exploding against black rocks off the coast. The murder mystery, meanwhile, goes still. The chorus offers no information—the gossip mainly reminds us why a person who lives in Monterey might want to keep secrets. We get no clues as to who committed the crime or who died.

As the series progresses, the structural gimmick begins to make the murder feel extraneous, almost as though it were a red herring—and the most delicious thing about the finale is that, in a way, we learn, it is. The great revelation of “Big Little Lies” is not the identity of the murder victim (it’s Perry, Celeste’s abusive husband, luridly played by Alexander Skarsgård), or the identity of the killer (that would be Bonnie, the young bohemian married to Madeline’s ex-husband, and played by Zoë Kravitz; she sees Perry beating Celeste and pushes him over a drop-off—in the book, Bonnie has her own history of being abused). The finale was set up to answer a different question. The women have been revealing their secrets in pieces throughout the series, and Jane’s secret is that her son, Ziggy, was conceived in a violent rape by a man she had just met. When, on the night of the fund-raiser, Perry approaches Celeste in a predatory fever, Jane, who has not previously been introduced to Celeste’s husband, suddenly recognizes his look: Perry is the man who picked her up, gave her a fake name, and assaulted her in a motel room. He has raped both of them, and fathered their sons.

Part of what has made “Big Little Lies” stand out amid the ever-growing crowd of interesting TV shows is its utterly natural rendering of violence as an ordinary part of women’s lives. (My colleague Emily Nussbaum described the show in her review as “a reflection on trauma.”) The show understands that minor social transactions between women can express the nuances of violence with a unique specificity and a nauseating subtlety. Jean Marc-Vallée, the director, roams these sun-drenched, luscious settings with a handheld camera and a sense of unease. In the finale, just before the climax, as a ballad drifts in from the lantern-lit party, fifteen remarkable seconds pass. One of Jane’s P.T.S.D. flashbacks has merged with the present, confirming Perry’s identity; her face becomes a mask of fear. Madeline looks at her, follows her gaze to Perry, and then looks back at Jane, altered—she’s figured it out. Madeline catches Celeste’s eye and turns it toward Jane, who nods almost imperceptibly. The show’s twist has been communicated wordlessly among all three of them. Witnessing this, Perry panics, and lunges forward to bludgeon his wife.

It’s an electric sequence. Witherspoon, as Madeline, was the immediate draw of “Big Little Lies,” with her mutinous Tracy Flick charm resurrected and blazing. But Kidman, as Celeste, emerged as the real showstopper. She has the most ambitious narrative arc in the series, the widest gap between appearance and truth. To friends and neighbors, her relationship with Perry looks dreamy and lustful; it’s actually a maelstrom of codependency and marital rape. (Male critics have written differently about “Big Little Lies” than women, by and large—at the Times, Mike Hale noted that Celeste was an abuse victim but then compared her relationship with Perry to “Fifty Shades of Grey.”) Celeste responds to abuse in a manner that feels painfully realistic. She tries to take ownership of her situation by hitting him back; she tries to find pleasure in it, fitting her lust around his blows. She articulates a neat narrative to Madeline; then a messier one to a therapist (Robin Weigert), with Perry present; then she tells an increasingly honest story as she returns to the therapist alone. By the final episode, Celeste has rented and furnished an apartment; a brutal and unambiguous beating has made her ready to leave with her twin sons. But Perry sees a message from the property manager on Celeste’s phone just before they leave for the fund-raiser, and, watching husband and wife get in their car, leaving the kids behind with a babysitter, you fear for her life.

By then, the show’s secondary mystery has been solved. There’s a bad seed in Otter Bay’s first-grade classroom: some kid has been bullying a girl named Amabella, who, in the first episode, identifies Jane’s son Ziggy as her attacker. Ziggy, though, maintains his innocence, and, in the finale, he reluctantly tells Jane that the kid who has been choking and biting Amabella is Max—one of Celeste’s twins. On the day of the fund-raiser, Jane breaks the news to Celeste as gently as she can. “I definitely considered the fact that he could be lying just to protect himself,” Jane says, referring to Ziggy. “And I had to face the fact that violence could be in his DNA, given who his dad is.” Celeste reels. She’s been telling herself that the twins don’t know about the abuse, but we know this is wishful thinking: the finale opens with a shot of an air vent in Celeste’s basement, through which the boys, playing with video games and toy guns, can hear her scream. Their world is already a miniature version of Celeste’s, beautiful and violent. “They grow out of it,” Jane says to Celeste about bullying kids. “Sometimes they don’t,” Celeste replies.

Much has been made of the show’s soundtrack: “Big Little Lies” draws on pop songs to set its tone as assiduously as any show since “The O.C.” The music tends toward the soulful, and it is often diegetic—we hear what the characters hear. (Many of the songs issue, improbably, from a well-stocked iPod operated by Madeline’s six-year-old daughter.) It is also woven into the story much the way that trauma is: as a pulsing, irregular beat—a jangly noise that rises and falls in volume and affects everyone who can hear it. The finale ends by intercutting the show’s most idyllic scene with its most violent: the mothers and their children are on the beach, dazzling and windswept; dark images of Perry beating Celeste in the other women’s presence intrude. The potentially garish mélange is rendered in a way that somehow feels appropriate, even ordinary—and surprisingly generous. That’s the approach that has made this queasy, gorgeous show so good.